St. Landry democrat., 1887-10-01

It is due to the fact that we have so much
and collate that our ability to read it is
so complete. The number of signs used
in it was about one thousand; of these,
the human figure, in various positions,
had sixty meanings, as syllable, or letter;
parts of the body, fifty birds, and parts
of birds, sixty; plants, flowers and
domestic animals, thirty reptiles or por-
appreciate, even with these details, the
enormous labor of the scientists who
have patiently worked out, line by line,
the many hundred inscriptions which
have been read since the discovery
of the Rosetta stone. The subjects of
the hieroglyphics, it may be observed,
are always the wonderful achievements,
in war or legislation, of some sovereign,
temples, it would appear, quite as much
for his own glory as for the honor OF the
strange gods in whom the ancient Egypt
ians believed.
The most curious system of writing in
the world is that of the Chinese. They
now write characters which neither rep
resent objects, like those of the picture
writers, nor express ideas, like those of
the symbolical writers. Their figures
resemble those of the hieroglyphics, in
that they stand for syllables; but the pc
culiarity of the Chinese is that every
syllable is also a word-that is, all the
words consist of single syllable only.
The number of their characters is esti
mated to be about $4,000. Chinese writ
ing appears to be a very crude develop
ment of the picture system. The char
acters are said to be all derived from 214
radicals, which were originally attempts
to reproduce the common objects of
everyday life. The last cut shows
some specimens of the early Chinese
writing The symbols of the water, the
lamb and brightness" are, of course,
readily understood. In the same cut is
shown the difference between the old and
present styles. 1t will be seen that the
characters have lost all resemblance to
the objects for which they stand and
become mere arbitrary signs.
In same cut is also seen the method
by which composite words are built up
by the Chinese out of the radicals. Fig
ure three stands for news" it is said to
be composed of the two radical figures
one and two, one signifying "a door,"
and the other IAN ear" and hence to
mean that which enters by the door of
the ear, or that which one hears, Of the
eighty thousand Chinese characters only
the very learned master as many as tif-
teen or twenty thousand, and occasion
ally scholar will coin words to suit his
own conceptions, like one of our philos
ophers, which only those in the secret of
this method can make out. The Chinese
also have way of expressing things by
what they call the principle of associa-
ton; for instance, to draw character for
"house" and character for "fre" would
represent misfortune, because one of their
most common misfortunes is to have their
houses burned down. Some of the present
Chinese characters retain trace of their
origin, as attempts at the actual drawing
of objects, as where the symbol for
Heaven contains crosses, which were
evidently once placed there to represent
the stars. 1t is pleasant to turn from the
Chinese cumbersome and complicated
system to the easy and graceful method
Of writing which we employ. But the
present convenient shape of our letters
was adopted only by degrees, and long
after men had begun to spell by letters,
which are neither pictures of things nor
symbols of ideas, but represent sounds
simply.
JAMES T. RINGGoLD.